Are Indians moving freely within?
The understanding that the process of migration and urbanisation is very open, and that the people in backward regions in rural areas, dispossessed of their economic or social opportunities, can freely move into the developed regions or urban areas needs to be examined with empirical rigour. There are various exclusionary factors such as differential access to land, lack of basic amenities, increase in user charges of urban services, and inhospitable social environment for the migrants over time affecting their inflow adversely.
However, while the evidence indicating an increase in the mobility of men is tenuous, the migration of women linked to the strategy of seeking livelihood had gone up over the past three decades both in rural and urban areas. Marriage related mobility of women is determined by socio-cultural factors that change slowly over time; the recent spurt must therefore be attributed to migration due to economic reasons.
Interstate migrants constitute a small percentage of the total migrants in India. Going by the Census 2001 data, interstate migrants formed only 13% of the total migrants in the country, the figure being 25% for urban migrants. If one uses this percentage, the number of interstate migrants would be around 18.5 million in 2011, averaging less than 2 million a year. The NSS for the year 2007-08 shows that the interstate migrants are 11.5% of the total migrants, up from 10.3% in 1999-2000. NSS figure will, therefore, be lower than that of the Census.
The Economic Survey, based on an analysis of the age-cohort data, reports interstate migration to be five to six million per annum. Using the data of unreserved rail travel, this movement is estimated to be as high as nine million. The Survey identifies these as economic migrants. Railway traffic-based migration data has, however, been dismissed by researchers as being absurdly high. Further, a part of the increase in cohort-based analysis can be attributed to age reporting error in the Census. The migration picture would become clear only when clarifications are provided or more disaggregated tables are published by the Census authorities.
Amitabh Kundu is distinguished fellow at the Research and Information System for Developing Countries, former professor at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and has served as a member of National Statistical Commission The views expressed are personal